ON THE HILL WITH DOUG CHRISTIAN
CAPITOL HILL –
(AUDIO: Trump threatens whistleblower as a spy.)
That was President Donald Trump musing to the United States Mission to the United Nations how he should handle whistleblowers. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 was designed to prevent reprisals for whistleblowing.
The whistleblower, reported by the New York Times to be a CIA analyst, describes an attempted coverup of Trump’s July 25th call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The complaint reads in part:
“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple US officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
“White House officials told me that they were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”
“Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”
Montana Democratic Senator John Tester worried to TMN that an impeachment probe will not be narrowly focused on this complaint:
(AUDIO: Tester)
Doug Christian, Capitol Hill
